Jennifer Granholm ( former governor of Michigan ) : Republicans are a gift to Democrats : They are now anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-immigrant, anti-Latino, anti-Muslim, anti-Europe (particularly the French and the Greeks), anti-labor, anti-poor, anti-99 percent and now anti-college graduate

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This New GOP rhetoric enables us to eagerly welcome your castoffs into the Democratic Party where inclusivity is celebrated and their contributions are welcome.

POLITICO.COM
Thanks, GOP candidates, for move to far right
February 27, 2012


By Jennifer Granholm
Jennifer Granholm is the former governor of Michigan. She is now the host of “The War Room” on Current TV. She is also a visiting public policy and law professor at the University of California — Berkeley.


Thanks, GOP candidates, for move to far right


Some excerpts :

To appeal to the Republican base voter these days, GOP candidates are earnestly discussing ways to dismantle government — whether it’s the Energy Department, Education Department or … whatever the third one is. The far right is focused on shrinking government so small that it drowns in a bathtub — but reappears in state-mandated vaginal ultrasound probes.

Attacking the massive deficits that “harm our children’s future” by proposing tax cuts that add a whopping $5 trillion to the deficit. Skewering the rescue of the auto industry in one commercial while boasting about being pro-manufacturing in the next.

Indeed, the long primary will mean that the newly invigorated far right has ensured that the so-called traditional conservatives — like my dad’s generation, the save-your-money, make-prudent-but-conservative-investments kind of conservatives, the pragmatists who are uneasy with the cultural battles — well, they’re obviously disposable.

Dad couldn’t care less about legislating access to women’s contraception or ordering vaginal ultrasound probes — the very subjects make him uncomfortable. He cares about rational economic policy. But his party has left him, gone to tea.

It’s a trend that would have caused former Michigan Gov. George Romney to grimace. Mitt Romney’s Detroit bashing stands in painful contrast to his father’s compassionate, moderate legacy. Where did the pragmatic Mitt Romney of Massachusetts go? The one who thought it was important to offer access to health care to all his citizens? He, too, has gone to tea.

We’ve all watched Romney straining against his genes and his history, contorting himself into a human pretzel, twisting into an anti-immigrant frenzy, an unlikely chameleon of the severe far right.

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In their zeal to “let Detroit go bankrupt,” what’s left unsaid is the fact that the tea-steeped Republican presidential candidates are bankrupt of new ideas for moving this country forward in an aggressive global economy, bankrupt of compassion for those who are less fortunate and bankrupt of compromise with those who view the issues differently than they do.

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